Verbing Nouns
rogersgeorge on October 11th, 2016
I mentioned this topic before, so this post is more a rant than an actual lesson. Look at the first cell in today’s Lola:
She said “loan” instead of “lend.”
Using a noun as a verb has a long and popular (notice I didn’t say “noble”) history in English. It’s so common that sometimes folks for whom English is a second (or third or more) language can get confused. This is a virtue of highly inflected languages—the inflectional endings make it easy to tell nouns from verbs. The trouble is, you have to memorize all those inflections.
My rant is this: don’t use a noun for a verb unless you can’t think of a good word that’s already a verb.
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